The Good War That Wasn’t—and Why It Matters: World War II’s Moral Legacy

By Ted Grimsrud

A war is always a moral event. However, the most destructive war in human history has not received much moral scrutiny. The Good War That Wasn't--and Why It Matters examines the moral legacy of this war, especially for the United States.
Drawing on the just war tradition and on moral values expressed in widely circulated statements of purpose for the war, the book asks: How did American participation in the war fit with just cause and just conduct criteria?
Subsequently the book considers the impact of the war on American foreign policy in the years that followed. How did American actions cohere (or not) with the stated purposes for the war, especially self-determination for the peoples of the world and disarmament?
Finally, the book looks at the witness of war opponents. Values expressed by war advocates were not actually furthered by the war. However, many war opponents did inspire efforts that effectively worked toward the goals of disarmament and self-determination.
The Good War That Wasn't--and Why It Matters develops its arguments in pragmatic terms. It focuses on moral reasoning in a commonsense way in its challenge to widely held assumptions about World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630876289

Ted Grimsrud

Ted Grimsrud is the Professor of Theology and Peace Studies at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Among his books are Instead of Atonement: The Bible's Salvation Story and Our Hope for Wholeness (2013), Compassionate Eschatology: The Future as Friend (2011), A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder's Pacifist Epistemology (2010), and Theology as if Jesus Matters (2009).

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The Good War That Wasn’t—and Why It Matters

World War II’s Moral Legacy

Ted Grimsrud

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THE GOOD WAR THAT WASN’T—AND WHY IT MATTERS

World War II’s Moral Legacy

Copyright © 2014 Ted Grimsrud. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-102-1

EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-628-9

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Grimsrud, Ted, 1954–

The good war that wasn’t—and why it matters : World War II’s moral legacy / Ted Grimsrud.

x + 286 p. ; 23 cm. —Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-102-1

1. World War,

1939–1945

—Moral and ethical aspects.

I. Title.

D743 .G75 2014

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For all the warriors for peace who have challenged and inspired me, including, among many others:

The World War II conscientious objectors

Vietnam War–era prophets such as Earl and Pat Hostetter Martin

My teachers of blessed memory, John Howard Yoder, Walter Wink, and Gordon Kaufman

My life partner, Kathleen Temple, and my sister, Sally Grimsrud

And, maybe most of all, Johan Grimsrud and Jill Humphrey, who (with Elias and Marja) remind me why the fight must continue

Preface

I have lived with World War II all my life. I remember, now with shame, playing bombs over Tokyo as a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s in western Oregon. It was the War, a defining event for both of my parents—for one thing, it brought them together. I grew up believing this indeed was a good war.

My views long ago changed, and I came to believe that no war could possibly be good. However, the beliefs I grew up with about the good war are widespread. They have been expressed by countless conversation partners I have had over many years. Since these conversations are always too short to give the beliefs about World War II adequate scrutiny, I decided to write this book as an extended version of my side of the ongoing conversation.

I am grateful for the many people and institutions that have encouraged me to keep talking and thinking and writing about World War II and about war and peace more generally. I am able to mention only a few in this short space.

Eastern Mennonite University has provided a place for many conversations about peace issues and much encouragement for the work of peace theology. I deeply appreciate the friendships and academic stimulation—and, most practically in relation to this book, the yearlong sabbatical during the 2010–11 school year when I completed the first draft of the book.

Ever since I studied the phenomenon of conscientious objection to World War II for my doctoral dissertation in the mid-1980s, I have drawn inspiration from the experiences of those few who, at great cost, said no and testified to the reality that the embrace of war was not unanimous in their society. Not many survive now, but their witness lives on. I offer this book in gratitude to them.

In the years since the 1970s, I have come to know many people who actively opposed one of the most terrible wars in modern times, the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. Some of the first were vets I met in college who spoke against the war after returning home. Others were antiwar activists. Maybe the most inspirational have been a few I have become friends with who put their own lives on the line to live in Vietnam during the war years and seek to help repair at least a little of the damage the war caused, including especially Earl and Pat Hostetter Martin.

Though I am comfortable with the label theologian, in this book I do little overt theological reflection. But I would not want to suggest that my theological sensibilities are absent—they are probably present in ways I can’t even see myself. In any writing I do, my main theological mentors are always present, even if subconsciously. Two of the three most important, Gordon Kaufman (himself a World War II CO) and Walter Wink, have passed on in recent years. I miss their presence—as I still miss the presence of my third mentor, John Howard Yoder.

I am certain that this book would never have seen the light of day apart from the steady encouragement of my wife, Kathleen Temple. Her most recent, deeply appreciated, contribution was to join me on a wonderful weeklong road trip along the Blue Ridge Parkway and Natchez Trace Parkway—and to read the entire penultimate draft of this book aloud. My sister, Sally Grimsrud, also graciously read earlier drafts of almost all the chapters. Both made many helpful suggestions.

Though our son Johan and his wife Jill didn’t contribute directly to this book, by living their own integrity-filled lives and by bringing Elias and Marja into the world, they inspire and motivate me more than I can ever say.

1

Introduction: The United States and the Myth of Redemptive Violence

Taking the Measure of the War

World War II was big, maybe the biggest event in human history. During the six years of what became an immense global conflict, as many as eighty million people lost their lives. That’s more than the entire population of most countries. Many times more people had their lives profoundly traumatized. Uncounted millions were displaced. The earth itself suffered immense damage. The War’s¹ impact remains present and alive throughout the world. It has shaped the morality of all subsequent generations. For many, especially in the world’s one superpower, the United States of America, World War II remains the historical and moral touchstone for understanding the necessity and even moral goodness of military force.²

My own life, in ways typical for Americans of my generation, has been shaped by the War. Both of my parents served in the U.S. Army. My father, Carl Grimsrud, enlisted in the National Guard in 1941. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), he was pressed into active duty. The Army placed him in eastern Oregon to guard against a feared Japanese invasion; there he met my mother, Betty Wagner. In time, Carl was shipped to the South Pacific, where he spent three intense years—he was wounded, he killed, he contracted malaria, but he managed to survive, even to thrive. He received a battlefield commission and reached the rank of captain. As the Army later demobilized, he was asked to stay in and make a career of the military, with the promise of further advancement. He said no, not because of any negative feelings about the Service, but because he had made a commitment to Betty to return to Oregon and establish a life together. While Carl served in combat, Betty worked as a military recruiter, gaining the rank of sergeant prior to her discharge.

My father never talked with me about his experience. (Actually, there was one conversation. When I was seventeen, he told me how meaningful his experience was in the context of encouraging me to consider applying to one of the military academies for college. When I showed no interest, he dropped the subject.) He did share one important part of his experience, though. He had a close friend in the Army who died in combat. His name was Ted.

There was another way the War impacted my life. I was born in 1954, my parents’ fourth child. Their mixture of blood types made me an Rh factor baby. For the mother, this condition gets worse with each pregnancy. By the time I came along, it was bad enough that if left to my own devices as a newborn, I would not have been able to create my own blood and I would have perished. Medicine was learning how to combat this condition, and one type of intervention that met with success was total blood transfusions for the baby. Few pediatricians had yet mastered the procedure—mainly those who had served in the War and learned about blood transfusions through working on severely wounded soldiers. It happened that in our small hospital in Eugene, Oregon, we did have one such doctor, who saved my life with this new procedure.

So, World War II brought my parents together, it provided my name, and it made the medical intervention that saved my life possible. But the War also shaped me as an American in other ways. It provided a mythology of the redemptive possibilities of violence. It was a good war that defended the American way of life and defeated forces that were clearly evil. As such, it set the tone for belief that America was a force for good in the world, that America’s ongoing military actions were in continuity with the Good War, and that just as my parents served this good in the world with their military service, so should I be ready to do the same.

I’ll say more later in this chapter about how I personally came to disbelieve in the redemptive possibilities of violence (what I will call the myth of redemptive violence). However, I have been unusual in my disbelief. Perhaps in large part because Americans mostly experienced the benefits of being on the winning side of World War II without much of the cost of destructive side of the War,³ it was easy for young people growing up in the 1950s and 1960s to accept without much dissonance the idea that war can be a good thing, that at times it is necessary, and that Americans in particular almost always fight in good wars.

The U.S. war on Vietnam created significant disillusionment concerning America’s wars, and subsequent military actions have also contributed to serious doubt about their goodness by some in our society. Nonetheless, the general orientation I grew up with concerning the positive value of preparing for and when necessary fighting in good wars and certainty about America’s goodness in her wars has remained widespread. Witness the almost complete unanimity in the U.S. concerning the attacks on Afghanistan following the trauma of September 11, 2001. Witness also the sacrosanct character of the U.S. military budget that dominates federal spending even in times of budget crises and spiraling national debt (and that nearly matches the total military spending of all the rest of the world combined).⁴

I encounter this positive orientation toward America’s war fighting preparations and history of good wars regularly—and I usually see it overtly linked with U.S. involvement in World War II. As a convinced pacifist who teaches college classes in ethics, I make a point to introduce students to the ideals of principled nonviolence. The most instructive encounters with students generally come in my introductory ethics course, which is required for a cross section of the students at our college. Many of these students have never heard of pacifism before. Quite a few of them come from families with long histories of participation in the military.

Time after time, year after year, students are taken aback by my principled opposition to war. They quickly evoke World War II, the need to defeat Hitler and the Nazis, and the lack of any other viable alternatives to stop such overwhelming evil. One student spoke for many others in class in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001: Why would they be attacking us? We’ve never done anyone wrong. The U.S. stands for freedom, democracy, and against tyranny. Look what we did to stop Hitler.

Not only conservatives and strong believers in the virtues of the American military evoke the battle against Hitler and the Good War as the definitive refutation of pacifism. Even progressive do it. Katha Pollitt, a decidedly leftist columnist for the politically progressive and antimilitarist magazine The Nation,⁵ attacks pacifism in her sharply critical column on Nicholson Baker’s book on World War II, Human Smoke. Pollitt begins her column by stating that after reading Baker’s book she felt fury at pacifists and concludes that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill got it right when they realized that only massive violence could stop the Nazis.⁶

Such evocations of World War II seem to make war in general seem more acceptable. If we have a clear case of a necessary and, to some extent, redemptive war in history, we more easily imagine war being necessary in the future. And because war may be necessary in the future (as it was in the past), it is necessary now to prepare for war by devoting massive resources to the military. That is, when we sustain the myth of redemptive violence in relation to World War II, we will find it much more difficult not to accept that myth in relation to our current cultural context.

So, my concern in this book ultimately is with our current cultural context, the ways that wars and preparation for wars are tolerated, even embraced. I want to examine one key element of America’s toleration of present-day militarism—the belief that America’s military involvement in the greatest event of human history (World War II) was necessary, good, and even redemptive.

In this book, I offer an essay in moral philosophy with historical illustrations. I do not make any claims to originality in my use of the historical cases. I will rely on the work of historians, political thinkers, and moral philosophers. Perhaps my synthesis of their ideas and application to my own agenda will be distinctive, but my main goal is to raise questions, not to provide new information. I will raise questions that are not often asked. And I will offer responses to those questions that I believe could help free Americans from the spiral of violence heightened by acceptance of the myth of redemptive violence.

I have three sets of questions and issues I will engage. First, I will look at the War itself through moral eyes and ask whether it had just causes and employed just means. Second, I will consider the aftermath of World War II, especially as the American experience of the War has shaped U.S. foreign policy in the years since. The sum of my examination of these first two sets of questions and issues will be a sharp critique of the mythology that World War II and its legacy have had a redemptive impact on the world. This critique will lead to the third set of questions and issues: are there viable nonviolent alternatives to seeking human well-being in the face of tyranny and aggression?

Looking at World War II through moral eyes puts the ethical criteria that make up the just war theory on the table. As a pacifist, I do not see the just war theory to be an adequate moral response to the question of support for war. However, in ways that pacifism can’t (since it does not reason about war’s bases and conduct so much as simply deny the moral validity of all wars), the just war tradition offers us a framework for evaluating the morality of particular wars. So I will have in mind various just war criteria as they apply to the actual war we call World War II. Along with the more abstract traditional just war criteria, I will also seek to use as bases for moral evaluation the stated ideals that American leaders and their allies used to justify involvement in this war. I will summarize these in the next section of this Introduction.

I will reflect on the legacy of the War using moral criteria that can help us discern whether it was a good or just war. I do this in order to ask our moral reasoning to have teeth.⁷ I challenge those who think of World War II as a good war (with the recognition that the notion of good here is a moral notion that implies not all wars are good and we have some bases for determining what is good and what is not good) to think more carefully about that assignation. Further, I hope to show that if goodness is our fundamental criterion, we in fact should rethink our affirmation of World War II. And if World War II does not actually serve as an example of a good war, then it also should not serve as a basis for our acceptance of contemporary American military policies, practices, and claims.

I will test two main theses in the pages to come: (1) For the United States, World War II was morally problematic, not morally good. American leaders addressed authentic concerns when they made the moral case for entering World War II: the German threat in Europe and the military aggression of the Japanese in the Pacific. However, if we think of the War as a tool that served some morally valid goals, when we consider the actual execution of the War itself we will see that this tool broke free from the moral sensibilities that justified its use. In the course of the War, the linkage between the stated moral values and the actual practices became increasingly tenuous. Thus, by August 1945, the moral legacy of World War II in terms of its immediate justification had already become ambiguous.

When we follow the story through the postwar years, the War’s legacy becomes even more problematic. World War II transformed the United States. This transformation has resulted in a series of military interventions that share none of the possible moral defensibility of the initial entry into World War II. The tool came to dominate American foreign policy, leading to one violation after another of the criteria for just war.

So, if we look at World War II in its immediate context, we do see the U.S. responding to immoral actions by the Germans and the Japanese. However, the U.S. fought in ways that contradicted the moral values that had justified the nation’s involvement. When we consider the overall impact of World War II on America, we may be led to conclude that it was not a good war at all. It was a war that in the long term undermined the very moral values that had led to its support by millions of Americans.

(2) When we conclude that World War II was not a good or justifiable or even necessary war even as it was fought to support important moral values, we need not conclude that those moral values could not be (and were not) furthered. So, this is my second thesis: There are alternatives to war that address authentic moral concerns raised by injustice and tyranny.

Part One of this book will examine the events of World War II. Part Two will look at the War’s aftermath, focusing especially on its impact on American foreign policy. And Part Three will provide examples of how the moral ideals that stood at the center of the Allied rationale for going to war actually were furthered by committed people generally operating outside the auspices of nation-states and practice of warfare.

Why Morality Is Not a Peripheral Issue

To insist that the issue of warfare is inherently a moral issue is not simply to take a naïve, idealistic stance of trying to impose values on a situation that is inherently amoral. From start to finish, from the ground to the planning room, for all actors, warfare is infused with moral choices, moral convictions, and moral priorities.

I suspect if we looked at every war that societies have fought we would see that the rationale for the war and, especially, the appeals that were made to gain people’s support and participation in the war were overtly couched in moral terms. Certainly, this would be the case for World War II, probably on all fronts but without a doubt in the United States.

The Atlantic Charter was the foundational statement of war aims stated by American president Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill in August 1941.⁸ The American government used the Charter as a central appeal to gain support for involvement in the War. The Atlantic Charter served as the core content in the January 1, 1942, Declaration of Shared Commitment by the twenty-six nations that made up the first United Nations who joined together to defeat the Tripartite Pact (Germany, Italy, and Japan).⁹

The Charter emphasized a couple of main points: the centrality of self-determination for the world’s people and the need to disarm first the aggressor nations (the Axis powers) and ultimately all other nations. These two key moral appeals—that all people have the right of self-determination and that the world needs to be disarmed—indeed did stand at the center of the meaning the War had for many. The Atlantic Charter also provided the basis for a statement formulated by the American Federal Council of Churches in the midst of the War, The Six Pillars of Peace; released in 1943, and widely circulated, the Six Pillars supplied bases for a moral appeal to support and participate in the War.¹⁰ The Six Pillars also centered on self-determination (autonomy for subject peoples) and disarmament (controlling military establishments everywhere).

Americans supported the War, risked their lives and their children’s lives, and made other sacrifices mostly without complaint because they believed in the moral importance of this war. They understood this war to be fought in opposition to tyranny, in support of democracy, and in the hope of establishing an enduring peace that would make future wars obsolete.

Another reason for recognizing the centrality of moral convictions to the American experience of World War II (as would be the case with any other war) is that the decision intentionally to kill another human being is always a moral decision. The decision to kill is based on a sense that there are values, commitments, convictions that have enough moral weight to justify this ultimate sanction against other human beings. There are greater goods that must be furthered even when that involves overriding the general moral assumption that human life should not intentionally be taken.

The psychic cost of killing other human beings, the cost in material resources that preparation for killing in warfare requires of a society, the cost in risking one’s own life to engage in warfare, the cost in war’s destruction of human life and nature—all these costs can only be justified on moral grounds. There is some moral good that is seen to make the cost worthwhile, even if in part this good is simply resisting moral evil.

When a society makes the commitment to go to war, it makes a commitment to devote its blood and treasure for some purpose of high import. This purpose almost by definition must be expressed in moral terms: right versus wrong, good versus evil.

For those who fight in war, the ability to sustain the willingness to pay the extreme costs such engagement requires depends upon belief that one’s cause is in the right. We have learned in recent years—in relation to America’s war on Vietnam, for example—that soldiers who lose this sense of being in the right are much more prone to sustained emotional and psychological trauma after their participation in battle ends.¹¹

Ultimately, warfare has to do with our convictions concerning the value of human life. This is probably the most fundamental moral issue we all face. Warfare involves making choices to end human lives. These choices are made based on moral criteria (even if not always self-consciously understood in this way). We take life because we affirm some value that must be sustained by the killing and that takes priority over the particular human lives that are ended.

Because warfare is inherently a moral issue, in trying to understand any war we have to take into account the moral convictions that justified that particular war. What values (directly or implicitly) did the arguments in favor of that war draw upon? What moral principles or assumptions drew people into the war, gained their support and undergirded their willingness to participate?

In trying to assess the moral legitimacy of any war, then, we look at the rationales that were given in favor of the war at its beginning. We then evaluate how the war itself served those rationales. Certainly, philosophers and theologians, not to mention nonacademics, have always struggled to provide clear definitions for the term morality. However, there is a sense that we all have some kind of awareness of morality; it seems to be in our bones as human beings and infuses our experience of life. We do find it difficult to put into words what morality precisely is. I want to suggest that part of any solid definition of morality is the notion of stability. Human morality in some sense applies over time and across communities.

The point that is crucial for our purposes here is that in making moral appeals for certain actions and responses, we make ourselves accountable to the values and convictions we base those appeals upon.

So, in relation to World War II, we may say, first of all, that Americans’ involvement in the War followed from certain moral convictions. The War was understood to serve the rights of peoples to self-determination and the goal of the ultimate disarmament of all major nations in the world. Other purposes that were popularly supported included the need to defend the existence of our democratic institutions and to resist the expansionist tyrannies of Germany and Japan.

The popular moral appeals provide us with criteria for evaluating both the execution of the war during the years 1941–45 and the longer-term consequences of the War. Our reasons for making such evaluations may be simply to evaluate the moral authenticity of the War itself: was it truly a just war? Was it worth all that it cost? Was it consistent with the stated purposes for engaging in it? More importantly, though, we undertake this evaluation in order to consider how the legacy of this war might shape our current and future attitudes toward war and preparation for war.

In what follows we will engage in a moral evaluation of World War II. How do we think morally about this War that dwarfed all other wars? One way to answer this question, unfortunately often the default answer, is to assume that this was a necessary war, one that was fought honorably enough and was ultimately successful in defeating the evil Axis powers and furthering the cause of democracy in the world.¹² Even if not overtly couched in moral terms, this answer indeed makes a profoundly moral evaluation of the War. The operative word here, though, is assume. Such an answer—that American participation in World War II was self-evidently just and morally good—follows from assumptions more than from careful evaluation of the evidence.

Such a conclusion about the moral goodness (all things considered) of America’s War could, however, indeed follow from careful consideration of the evidence. Certainly much evidence can be interpreted to point in this direction. However, a careful evaluation of the evidence is rarely undertaken. We may thus use the term myth here. We have a myth of a good war—meaning not that belief in the moral goodness of the War is a lie or clearly wrong, but that the belief is more on the realm of acceptance by faith than of consideration of evidence.

Historian Harry Stout provides a template for a moral evaluation of a major war in his moral history of the American Civil War.¹³ Stout uses the basic tenets of the just war theory, both those concerning just causes for going to war and just conduct in war, to provide his bases for evaluating how the Civil War began and unfolded. His analysis concludes that while the Civil War may have been justifiable from the Union side in terms of just causes, both sides egregiously violated the just conduct criteria. Unfortunately, Stout does not add what I believe is a necessary component to this kind of analysis: a moral accounting of the aftermath of the Civil War. It is impossible to evaluate the moral legacy of any war without including as a central element of the evaluation a sense of what the war actually accomplished and what consequences resulted from the war.

British historian Norman Davies discusses the importance of a moral evaluation in his one-volume history of the War. He outlines five central factors that must be part of coming to terms with the War: geographical, military, ideological, political, and moral.¹⁴

Under the moral rubric, Davies provides helpful guidelines for thinking morally about the War: All sound moral judgments operate on the basis that the standards applied to one side in a relationship must be applied to all sides. . . . Secondly, . . . ‘Patriotism is not enough.’ ‘My country, right or wrong’ is an amoral slogan. . . . Lastly, it is essential that all moral judgments, all attempts to assess whether something be ‘Good’ or ‘Evil,’ be made by reference to universal principles and not to partisan feelings of hatred or contempt. To illustrate this last point, Davies cites the Nuremberg Tribunal after the War in which judges from the Allies determined the guilt or innocence of alleged Nazi war criminals. Nuremberg established categories of conduct that were asserted to apply to everyone as a basis for convicting people judged to have committed crimes against humanity.¹⁵ Davies provides a good framework for a moral accounting of World War II—supporting my earlier comment about the importance of stability in moral reasoning. His book does not make the moral factor central, but he does seek more than many historians to be self-conscious about how the moral dimension does factor in.

We do have two recent books that more explicitly focus throughout on a moral evaluation of the War: Michael Bess’s Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II¹⁶ and Michael Burleigh’s Moral Combat: A History of World War II.¹⁷

Bess takes a questioning approach. How did World War II stack up in relation to moral criteria? He seeks objectively to evaluate various aspects of the War on moral grounds.¹⁸ Bess shies away from strong conclusions. The general sense he gives is that for Americans the war was necessary, and Americans fought it for just reasons. They did cross the line numerous times in the use of unjust or disproportionate means, but overall, the War was morally good enough, says Bess.

Burleigh, on the other hand, is more directive and certain in his conclusions. He essentially argues that the Allied cause was just; war is a nasty business that unfortunately requires actions that in normal life would be considered immoral, but the good that was served by the Allied war effort justified the at times morally ambiguous means. The big question with Burleigh’s book, for our purposes, is whether he follows Davies’ criteria for moral evaluation. Does he apply his moral criteria equally to all sides? Does he cross the line to make the amoral slogan my country right or wrong into a moral justification for otherwise morally problematic actions? Furthermore, Burleigh clearly understands the aftermath of World War II quite differently than I do. So in some ways, his book stands as an alternative interpretation of the moral legacy of World War II to mine.

In the chapters to follow I will take the moral appeals that shaped Americans’ initial entry into World War II seriously. What were the criteria for a morally appropriate war that we may extrapolate from the Atlantic Charter, the Six Pillars of Peace, and other public statements (such as Franklin Roosevelt’s appeal to the Four Freedoms)? Also, I will consider the moral content of the arguments made by religious leaders such as the prominent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in favor of intervention.

From these moral appeals, I will establish a set of values we may use to evaluate the War and its aftermath. How consistent was the execution of the War with those stated values? How well did the outcome of the War and its aftermath further the moral aspirations that provided the rationale for involvement in the War?

I will give evidence to support my argument that the execution of the War, when evaluated in light of the moral framework that justified entering it, leaves us with numerous questions. The strongest case for a positive moral evaluation is that the moral justification for entering the War was so strong that even if some of the conduct criteria were violated, the War could still be seen as justifiable. However, this case must be evaluated in relation to the sheer cost of the War. Using the criterion of proportionality, it remains a challenging question whether (thinking mainly within the chronological parameters of the War itself) the good that was achieved outweighed the enormous cost in blood and treasure.

As the war proceeded, the Allies moved further and further from the moral framework that was used to justify entering the war. For example, by the end of the War, the intentional bombing of civilian populations became a direct part of the War effort, culminating in the use of atomic bombs twice on targets that were largely nonmilitary. The tool of warfare increasingly took on its own logic of ever-increasing and indiscriminate violence. Hence, the War slipped ever further from the logic articulated in the Atlantic Charter that centered on democracy and demilitarization.

My central argument in Part Two of this book will be that the War’s aftermath sheds crucial light on the War’s moral legacy for the United States. As a direct consequence of World War II, America was transformed into the world’s one superpower, with a permanent war economy, that in its foreign policy tended to disregard the moral logic of the rationales for entering the War.

The ongoing role World War II plays for Americans, I will suggest, makes it much easier for policymakers to pursue what has now come to be called full spectrum dominance. Americans have by and large supported all post-World War II wars